The students involved in the Save Middlesex Philosophy campaign have called a rally in protest at Middlesex University’s disgraceful decision to suspend philosophy staff and students for the ‘crime’ of campaigning to save their own jobs and courses:

Please come along and spread the word. We are also appealing for people to come to the Hendon campus on Friday 28 May from 10am onwards in solidarity with suspended students who have a hearing with management that day.

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bat020 is a journalist writer and activist based in London. interests include philosophy, Marxism, mathematics, technology and dance music. go to bat020.com for long posts, @bat020 for short ones, bat020.tumblr.com for somewhere in between.

19 Responses to Rally in solidarity with suspended staff and students

We can get for sure BIG artist’s contributions for a quite amazing Posters’ Campaign. It would be great to print some of them (I can explain the editing which has to be done with each of them — or communicate artists email adresses to deal directly with them) in a quite professional LARGE format (2x1m mini.) — to be exhibited in each of the Actions/Rallys etc. For sure, Media and Press and ‘School of Arts’ Management will adore it…

I wish I could attend the rally on Thursday but am 450 miles away in Scotland. Good luck with that rally and with struggle to save the Philosophy Department. This is a struggle against the enclosure of the cultural commons – it is part of the on-going capitalist logic of turning every aspect of our lives into an opportunity to buy and sell. The current financial crisis has given rise to an opportunity to intensify the exploitation within our society and offered another peg for the disciplining of workers and those who deny the capitalist logic.

I am appalled by this latest example of crass, pig-headed, brutal and – at the same time – cravenly conformist management tactics. I hope that your Dean Esche realises ju st what he is doing by his consent to act as judge, warder, and enforcement officer in the suspension of three staff-members who rate among the best, most prominent and outstandingly gifted philosophers presently working in this country. I salute those students and staff at Middlesex who have had the courage to stand up against what now looks very like a full-scale campaign of harassment and intimidation. Let us hope that solidarity, academic standards and common human decency will eventually (soon) win out against bone-headed management bullying.

SHAME on the rest of the staff and students if they do not come out in support at this stage, though I know how much that would cost as I’m just graduating myself. Where are your legal supporters?? These bullies must not be allowed to prevail.

I was recruited a few weeks ago to teach a course on the Middlesex University summer school and have already signed a contract but in the light of what’s happened am now going to rescind this, I was wondering if the campaign had any angle on the best way for me to go about this, ie. if I should do so publicly for example.